'Everyone who now reads and writes in the West, of whatever racial
background, sex or ideological camp, is still a son or daughter of
Homer': this is how Harold Bloom attempted to capture the place of
Homer in 1975, as part of his illustration of the anxiety of influence
in A Map of Misreading.1 Bloom's statement represents a well established way of thinking about the place of Homer in twentiethcentury culture. However, it seems to us that this vision of Homer
as the fountainhead of all Western literature, grand as it is, actually
underplays Homer's role in twentieth-century culture in at least two
respects. The first and most obvious problem is the restriction of
Homer's influence to 'the West', however conceived: even a superficial survey of Homeric translations published in the twentieth
century shows that Homer was deemed relevant to readers of, to
quote but a few, Ukrainian, Arabic, Chinese, Esperanto, Albanian,
Turkish, and Korean.2 To be sure, in some cases Homer was translated precisely as the defining author of Western literature; yet the
close engagement with Homeric epic on the part of readers and
writers from many corners of the world challenged and redefined
the very concept of Western literature. We may think of the ways in
which Derek Walcott's Omeros weaves connections between St Lucia
and the ancient Mediterranean, of how Odysseus navigates the

1 Bloom 1975: 33; see also Bloom 1973.

2 For a full list of translations of Homer published in the twentieth century see
Young 2003.

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